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Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892
“Pernicone's book is the most comprehensive and balanced study to date of the Italian anarchist movement.”—American Historical Review
Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin nurtured anarchism in Italy, making it the dominant expression of socialism—triumphant over Marxism and all other revolutionary doctrines. From the First International to the 1872 Anti-Authoritarian International, from government suppression and anarchist insurrection to Errico Malatesta's prominent role in resurrecting the anarchist movement, Nunzio Pernicone's original research provides a critical examination of early anarchist practices.
Nunzio Pernicone is an associate professor of history at Drexel University. He is the author of Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel.
Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin nurtured anarchism in Italy, making it the dominant expression of socialism—triumphant over Marxism and all other revolutionary doctrines. From the First International to the 1872 Anti-Authoritarian International, from government suppression and anarchist insurrection to Errico Malatesta's prominent role in resurrecting the anarchist movement, Nunzio Pernicone's original research provides a critical examination of early anarchist practices.
Nunzio Pernicone is an associate professor of history at Drexel University. He is the author of Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel.
356 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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November 6, 2016
I'm a historian of the global anarchist movement (Black Flame - 2009; Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism - 2013), but during what I term the First Wave (1868-1894), the Italian anarchist movement was always a bit vague to me. The reason was that most historians make a point of stressing that the Italians made their mark not in Italy, but as travelling militants, especially in Egypt, Tunisia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and the United States. But the conundrum was: if Italian anarchists were so influential in the revolutionary labour movement abroad, how was it possible that they had little traction where they came from?
Now Pernicone as helped explain why: Firstly, the dominance in Italy from the time of the Italian Federation of the IWMA of a form of self-described anarcho-collectivism (later anarcho-communism) that was insurrectionist and anti-syndicalist in the manner of Hatta Shuzo and the "pure" anarchists of Japan (they initially supported mass formations, but were just not very keen on unions), and later due to repression became staunchly anti-organisationist / anti-mass too. Not a smooth trajectory, bearing in mind that the likes of the young insurrectionist Luigi Galleani also cut his teeth on worker organising. Secondly, the new Italian state was dominated by two political factions: the “Historic Right” consisting of conservatives and monarchists, while the “Historic Left” consisted of nationalists and republicans – but this “Left” was compromised by its post-unification support for the monarchy; as a result, until the 1890s, government swung between two anti-socialist poles, which saw the emergent anarchist movement and the socialists more broadly, suffer continual cycles of repression. This repression was meted out by two processes that were not submitted to the courts where they could have been challenged: “admonishment” under which militants were put under restrictive surveillance; and domicilio coatto, which involved forced internal exile on islands off the coast such as Lampedusa.
And yet, despite this climate, organisational efforts were perennial. The first International Revolutionary Brotherhood organisation in Italy, the Society of Legionnaires of the Italian Social Revolution (SLRSI), was founded by Bakunin in 1866, being reformed the next year as the Liberty & Justice (LeG) group, which lead directly to the foundation of the Italian Federation (FI) of the IWMA in 1869 that adhered to Bakunin’s line against Marx. Although initially based in Naples and its docks and the island of Sicily with more than 3,500 members by 1870, and swelling to an early peak of 32,450 members by 1874, primarily in north-central Italy, the FI was heavily repressed by the state in the late 1870s, while its insurrectionist (which later developed into an anti-organisationist) bias meant it would have to wait decades to achieve its own trade union central. But one of the key innovations of the FI was its emphasis on the equality of women: driven by women leaders such as Luisa “Gigia” Minguzzi of the FI’s Tuscan Federation and Vincenza Matteuzzi of the FI’s Marchian-Umbrian Federation, by 1876, the FI had organised women’s sections and groups in the cities and towns of Florence, Aquila, Imola, Perrugia, Carrara and Prato.
By 1880, the FI was essentially dead in the water – although well into the decade in northern Italy, groups in various cities remained loyal to the internationalist line and still considered themselves part of the FI, now aligned to the Black International. Although repression had a generally negative impact on the Italian anarchist movement, with the majority adhering to a self-defeating self-described “anarcho-communist” line that talked insurrection but adopted anti-organisationism, so did little but produce incendiary newspapers and eschewed worker’s struggles, there were some positive organisational developments among the constructive minority. For example, in 1885, Ambrogio Galli’s Anarchist Communist Group (GCA) of Milan founded the Upper Italian Federation (FAI) with the purpose of reviving the movement, particularly among the workerists of the Italian Workers’ Party (POI) founded three years earlier with a programme that excluded from membership any who were not working class; initially the two camps had much in common, but the hostility of most anarchists to what they saw as the reformism of trade unions lead to a parting of their ways. There was better progress in 1885 when the Forlì Congress brought together 11 northern cities, scores of anarchist groups and federations from almost every region, resulting in the formation in August of the regional Anarchist Socialist Federation of Pesaro-Urbino (FASPU) and by 1887, a Forlì International Federation (FIF) was founded with 300 members; meanwhile although in 1876, a tiny and ephemeral Florentine Anarchist Federation (FAF) had been founded, adhering to Malatesta’s pro-organisational line, significant advances were made by Minguzzi among women workers at one of the two cigarette factories in Florence. However, these initiatives remained overwhelmingly regional and were unable to achieve national federation.
One of Bakunin’s main Italian disciples and in many ways his successor, was Errico Malatesta (1853-1932) who turned his back on his middle class origins to become an inveterate militant, insurgent, organiser and polemicist, and moved from an “anarcho-communist” insurrectionist position that he had held in the 1870s to a mass anarchist position. In 1889, he wrote his Programme, published in his newspaper L’Associazione, in Nice, France, as a call to arms against the deleterious effects of the anti-organisationist, terrorist and individualist deviations which had driven the Italian anarchist movement into isolation from the working class. Impressed by the strike-wave then surging across Europe, especially the struggle of the London dockworkers, Malatesta wrote in another article in the newspaper that “The masses arrive at great vindications by means of small protests and small revolts. Let us join them and spur them forward... Indeed every strike has its revolutionary characteristic; every strike finds energetic men [sic.] to punish the bosses and, above all, to attack property and to show the strikers that it is easier to take than to ask.”
In his neo-Bakuninist Programme, Malatesta stated that “a great revolution is approaching, perhaps it is imminent,” and so the anarchist movement was faced with a “great mission” for which it needed to construct an international revolutionary anarchist-socialist party (later described by Malatesta as “the totality of all who embrace the programme, who advocate its triumph and who consider themselves bound not to do anything opposed to it”). As Pernicone paraphrases it, “Malatesta believed that although only the masses could make the revolution, they needed the guidance of a vanguard anarchist party. For only the anarchists, who harboured no secret desire for power, could arouse the masses to full consciousness of their might and spur them to destroy the state and every other obstacle blocking emancipation. And only the anarchists could be relied upon to resist the formation of new governments that would impose their will upon the masses, arrest and divert the course of the revolution, and prevent the evolution of a libertarian society.”
Malatesta’s Programme finally bore fruit in 1891 at the Capolago Congress in Switzerland, to which more than 200 associations (two thirds of them anarchist and one third socialist and workerist) affiliated, representing more than 50 Italian cities and towns, plus exile groups from Switzerland, France, Britain, Egypt, the United States, Argentina and Brazil, at which it was overwhelmingly decided to found a Revolutionary Anarchist Socialist Party (PSAR), which soon established regional federations across Italy; repressed by the state, the PSAR’s regional federations were revived in 1897, though by then, Malatesta had moved away from the party’s original syncretism towards endorsing a far more ideologically coherent programme; within fifteen years, the Italian pro-organisational anarchists controlled their own 80,000-strong anarcho-syndicalist labour centre, the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI).
In sum, Pernicone has: corrected a longstanding Marxist occlusion regarding the Italian revolutionary left between the Risorgimento (state unification) of 1871 and the eventual establishment of a Marxist party in 1892, a bias that reflects the initial dominance of the Bakuninists; restored the pro-organisational history of the Italian movement - which was especially defined by its dispute with the anti-organisationists, a battle that it eventually won, in time to be on the barricades during the anti-colonial Red Week in 1914, not to mention the revolutionary Red Years of 1919-1920, with the USI peaking at 800,000 members, backed by a political organisation - in echo of Bakunin's dual-organisational strategy - the 20,000-strong Italian Anarchist Union (UAI); and lastly, Pernicone has offered tantalising glimpses of the establishment of Women's Sections which were to prove so influential as the vanguards of anarcho-syndicalism where it dominated the labour movement in most of Latin America until the 1930s.
Now Pernicone as helped explain why: Firstly, the dominance in Italy from the time of the Italian Federation of the IWMA of a form of self-described anarcho-collectivism (later anarcho-communism) that was insurrectionist and anti-syndicalist in the manner of Hatta Shuzo and the "pure" anarchists of Japan (they initially supported mass formations, but were just not very keen on unions), and later due to repression became staunchly anti-organisationist / anti-mass too. Not a smooth trajectory, bearing in mind that the likes of the young insurrectionist Luigi Galleani also cut his teeth on worker organising. Secondly, the new Italian state was dominated by two political factions: the “Historic Right” consisting of conservatives and monarchists, while the “Historic Left” consisted of nationalists and republicans – but this “Left” was compromised by its post-unification support for the monarchy; as a result, until the 1890s, government swung between two anti-socialist poles, which saw the emergent anarchist movement and the socialists more broadly, suffer continual cycles of repression. This repression was meted out by two processes that were not submitted to the courts where they could have been challenged: “admonishment” under which militants were put under restrictive surveillance; and domicilio coatto, which involved forced internal exile on islands off the coast such as Lampedusa.
And yet, despite this climate, organisational efforts were perennial. The first International Revolutionary Brotherhood organisation in Italy, the Society of Legionnaires of the Italian Social Revolution (SLRSI), was founded by Bakunin in 1866, being reformed the next year as the Liberty & Justice (LeG) group, which lead directly to the foundation of the Italian Federation (FI) of the IWMA in 1869 that adhered to Bakunin’s line against Marx. Although initially based in Naples and its docks and the island of Sicily with more than 3,500 members by 1870, and swelling to an early peak of 32,450 members by 1874, primarily in north-central Italy, the FI was heavily repressed by the state in the late 1870s, while its insurrectionist (which later developed into an anti-organisationist) bias meant it would have to wait decades to achieve its own trade union central. But one of the key innovations of the FI was its emphasis on the equality of women: driven by women leaders such as Luisa “Gigia” Minguzzi of the FI’s Tuscan Federation and Vincenza Matteuzzi of the FI’s Marchian-Umbrian Federation, by 1876, the FI had organised women’s sections and groups in the cities and towns of Florence, Aquila, Imola, Perrugia, Carrara and Prato.
By 1880, the FI was essentially dead in the water – although well into the decade in northern Italy, groups in various cities remained loyal to the internationalist line and still considered themselves part of the FI, now aligned to the Black International. Although repression had a generally negative impact on the Italian anarchist movement, with the majority adhering to a self-defeating self-described “anarcho-communist” line that talked insurrection but adopted anti-organisationism, so did little but produce incendiary newspapers and eschewed worker’s struggles, there were some positive organisational developments among the constructive minority. For example, in 1885, Ambrogio Galli’s Anarchist Communist Group (GCA) of Milan founded the Upper Italian Federation (FAI) with the purpose of reviving the movement, particularly among the workerists of the Italian Workers’ Party (POI) founded three years earlier with a programme that excluded from membership any who were not working class; initially the two camps had much in common, but the hostility of most anarchists to what they saw as the reformism of trade unions lead to a parting of their ways. There was better progress in 1885 when the Forlì Congress brought together 11 northern cities, scores of anarchist groups and federations from almost every region, resulting in the formation in August of the regional Anarchist Socialist Federation of Pesaro-Urbino (FASPU) and by 1887, a Forlì International Federation (FIF) was founded with 300 members; meanwhile although in 1876, a tiny and ephemeral Florentine Anarchist Federation (FAF) had been founded, adhering to Malatesta’s pro-organisational line, significant advances were made by Minguzzi among women workers at one of the two cigarette factories in Florence. However, these initiatives remained overwhelmingly regional and were unable to achieve national federation.
One of Bakunin’s main Italian disciples and in many ways his successor, was Errico Malatesta (1853-1932) who turned his back on his middle class origins to become an inveterate militant, insurgent, organiser and polemicist, and moved from an “anarcho-communist” insurrectionist position that he had held in the 1870s to a mass anarchist position. In 1889, he wrote his Programme, published in his newspaper L’Associazione, in Nice, France, as a call to arms against the deleterious effects of the anti-organisationist, terrorist and individualist deviations which had driven the Italian anarchist movement into isolation from the working class. Impressed by the strike-wave then surging across Europe, especially the struggle of the London dockworkers, Malatesta wrote in another article in the newspaper that “The masses arrive at great vindications by means of small protests and small revolts. Let us join them and spur them forward... Indeed every strike has its revolutionary characteristic; every strike finds energetic men [sic.] to punish the bosses and, above all, to attack property and to show the strikers that it is easier to take than to ask.”
In his neo-Bakuninist Programme, Malatesta stated that “a great revolution is approaching, perhaps it is imminent,” and so the anarchist movement was faced with a “great mission” for which it needed to construct an international revolutionary anarchist-socialist party (later described by Malatesta as “the totality of all who embrace the programme, who advocate its triumph and who consider themselves bound not to do anything opposed to it”). As Pernicone paraphrases it, “Malatesta believed that although only the masses could make the revolution, they needed the guidance of a vanguard anarchist party. For only the anarchists, who harboured no secret desire for power, could arouse the masses to full consciousness of their might and spur them to destroy the state and every other obstacle blocking emancipation. And only the anarchists could be relied upon to resist the formation of new governments that would impose their will upon the masses, arrest and divert the course of the revolution, and prevent the evolution of a libertarian society.”
Malatesta’s Programme finally bore fruit in 1891 at the Capolago Congress in Switzerland, to which more than 200 associations (two thirds of them anarchist and one third socialist and workerist) affiliated, representing more than 50 Italian cities and towns, plus exile groups from Switzerland, France, Britain, Egypt, the United States, Argentina and Brazil, at which it was overwhelmingly decided to found a Revolutionary Anarchist Socialist Party (PSAR), which soon established regional federations across Italy; repressed by the state, the PSAR’s regional federations were revived in 1897, though by then, Malatesta had moved away from the party’s original syncretism towards endorsing a far more ideologically coherent programme; within fifteen years, the Italian pro-organisational anarchists controlled their own 80,000-strong anarcho-syndicalist labour centre, the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI).
In sum, Pernicone has: corrected a longstanding Marxist occlusion regarding the Italian revolutionary left between the Risorgimento (state unification) of 1871 and the eventual establishment of a Marxist party in 1892, a bias that reflects the initial dominance of the Bakuninists; restored the pro-organisational history of the Italian movement - which was especially defined by its dispute with the anti-organisationists, a battle that it eventually won, in time to be on the barricades during the anti-colonial Red Week in 1914, not to mention the revolutionary Red Years of 1919-1920, with the USI peaking at 800,000 members, backed by a political organisation - in echo of Bakunin's dual-organisational strategy - the 20,000-strong Italian Anarchist Union (UAI); and lastly, Pernicone has offered tantalising glimpses of the establishment of Women's Sections which were to prove so influential as the vanguards of anarcho-syndicalism where it dominated the labour movement in most of Latin America until the 1930s.
April 29, 2010
Armed with footnotes and provisioned with a healthy bibliography, Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892 is not an easy read for the casual reader, or even the casual “antiauthorian leftist.” Isn’t that the euphemism for anarchist these days? Still, I don’t regret the time I spent reading—insurrection after insurrection, congress upon congress—the nearly 300 pages of text in Nunzio Pernicone’s history of these three decades. He writes not just about heroes like Errico Malatesta, but introduces the reader to supporting characters as well.
As an Italian-American who doesn’t even know her father’s real last name, I’ll admit I checked the index first, for Rossi, Russo, Rosso, anything that might have been shortened to our “boat name,” Ross. During these years my Italian grandfather (or was it his father?) immigrated to the United States, for lots of good reasons, as cataloged by Pernicone: the brutal introduction of capitalist farming methods, famine, and a cholera epidemic. I met Giovanni Russo, region of origin unspecified, who immigrated to Brazil and started an anarchist colony. Alas, I learned also that the Calabria, where my dad’s folks originated, was generally not in the vanguard during these turbulent times in Italy. I fear my ancestors really were the backward peasants the anarchists tried to energize.
But let’s move from mere genealogy to history. Not just women’s history has been “stolen from us,” and I am very grateful to AK Press for publishing this and other works of anarchist history and philosophy. It was almost as true in my young adulthood as it was for the “anarchist prince” Peter Kropotkin that one had to read about anarchism piecemeal in pamphlets. And of course, the reports of police agents are often the only written documents for historical research, as a glance at the footnotes and bibliography in the book reveals.
If we are patient readers, Pernicone’s friendly but balanced, serious, well-documented history fills a need for those of us on the left who are not “anarchist studies” specialists. It occasionally strikes a light, even humorous and lovingly critical, tone. The story about the overweight Michel Bakunin, Russian but the father of Italian anarchism, and his extrication from a carriage on an escape from Italy made me laugh out loud.
Without getting into the learning-from-and-repeating history discussion, the gifts of this book are numerous: the reader can actually feel the pressure militants exerted on themselves and their recruits to stage insurrection after insurrection even in the face of serious repression, understand the betrayal comrades felt when Andrea Costa “sold out” to become a politician, and appreciate the contingencies of history (i.e., how things might have gone another way). After all, anarchism was once a popular movement not just in Italy, and helped set the agenda for socialist activism, but like all movements it was composed of human beings with flaws as well as strengths.
How was this powerful international movement pushed to the fringe and then outside the boundary of political discourse, trivialized as a frivolous critique of organization, or slandered as the equivalent of terrorism in contemporary metropolitan dailies? Sometimes it is easier for feminists and participants in other contemporary movements to open our minds about own activism and the way forward by reading and thinking about a history a bit more distant and “other” than the anti-globalization actions in Seattle in 2000. Pernicone provides us with a history and leaves drawing parallels with contemporary times to the reader.
Do the multiplicity of newspapers started by Italian anarchists suggest a similarity to our current reliance on the Internet? Are activists today missing the boat as anarchists of this period did with early labor organizing? Read and learn.
Review by Frances Chapman
As an Italian-American who doesn’t even know her father’s real last name, I’ll admit I checked the index first, for Rossi, Russo, Rosso, anything that might have been shortened to our “boat name,” Ross. During these years my Italian grandfather (or was it his father?) immigrated to the United States, for lots of good reasons, as cataloged by Pernicone: the brutal introduction of capitalist farming methods, famine, and a cholera epidemic. I met Giovanni Russo, region of origin unspecified, who immigrated to Brazil and started an anarchist colony. Alas, I learned also that the Calabria, where my dad’s folks originated, was generally not in the vanguard during these turbulent times in Italy. I fear my ancestors really were the backward peasants the anarchists tried to energize.
But let’s move from mere genealogy to history. Not just women’s history has been “stolen from us,” and I am very grateful to AK Press for publishing this and other works of anarchist history and philosophy. It was almost as true in my young adulthood as it was for the “anarchist prince” Peter Kropotkin that one had to read about anarchism piecemeal in pamphlets. And of course, the reports of police agents are often the only written documents for historical research, as a glance at the footnotes and bibliography in the book reveals.
If we are patient readers, Pernicone’s friendly but balanced, serious, well-documented history fills a need for those of us on the left who are not “anarchist studies” specialists. It occasionally strikes a light, even humorous and lovingly critical, tone. The story about the overweight Michel Bakunin, Russian but the father of Italian anarchism, and his extrication from a carriage on an escape from Italy made me laugh out loud.
Without getting into the learning-from-and-repeating history discussion, the gifts of this book are numerous: the reader can actually feel the pressure militants exerted on themselves and their recruits to stage insurrection after insurrection even in the face of serious repression, understand the betrayal comrades felt when Andrea Costa “sold out” to become a politician, and appreciate the contingencies of history (i.e., how things might have gone another way). After all, anarchism was once a popular movement not just in Italy, and helped set the agenda for socialist activism, but like all movements it was composed of human beings with flaws as well as strengths.
How was this powerful international movement pushed to the fringe and then outside the boundary of political discourse, trivialized as a frivolous critique of organization, or slandered as the equivalent of terrorism in contemporary metropolitan dailies? Sometimes it is easier for feminists and participants in other contemporary movements to open our minds about own activism and the way forward by reading and thinking about a history a bit more distant and “other” than the anti-globalization actions in Seattle in 2000. Pernicone provides us with a history and leaves drawing parallels with contemporary times to the reader.
Do the multiplicity of newspapers started by Italian anarchists suggest a similarity to our current reliance on the Internet? Are activists today missing the boat as anarchists of this period did with early labor organizing? Read and learn.
Review by Frances Chapman
June 5, 2014
A good introduction to Italian anarchism. I found the discussion regarding anti-organizationalist anarchist to be especially interesting.
February 25, 2020
NICE BOOK.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews